Tethered UAV-active defense against intelligent cluster

Purpose With the development of wireless networks and artificial intelligence technology, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) clusters are widely used in various fields and cluster intelligence attacks are more harmful. However, most methods defending against UAV clusters produce consumption of non-reusable resources. To address this problem, a tethered UAV is adopted to perform active defense against adversary UAV clusters in this article, which can reduce the consumption of nonreusable resources. Design/methodology/approach Using tethered UAV to enter the opponent’s UAV cluster and analyze the flow of packets in adversary UAV cluster to find and occupy the central node. The tethered UAV can acquire and analyze key packets by deploying a grayhole attack at the location of the central node, after which the packets are selectively tampered with and discarded to cripple the opposing UAV cluster. Findings Comparing packet loss rate and delay with a normal network and the network that suffered from grayhole attack, it can be seen that the proposed scheme makes the tethered UAV close to the normal nodes in the UAV cluster and difficult to be detected. In addition, the tethered UAV is able to capture more packets compared to the other two networks, and the average deviation of the tethered UAV in capturing packets is around 5% in repeated experiments. Originality/value This article proposes an active defense method assisted by tethered UAV, which can minimize the consumption of nonreusable resources. The tethered UAV is converged to ordinary nodes of the opponent’s cluster, in which it is not easily detected. It provides a new direction for point-air defense technology.